Sunday, February 3, 2013

Two-part article on Albert Woodfox, the Angola 3 and the broader epidemic of solitary confinement in US prisons, written by Katti Gray, The Root

(Herman Wallace, left, with Albert Woodfox, right.)

We are reprinting in full, two recent articles by Katti Gray, writing for The Root. Part one, entitled "Freedom After 40 Years in Solitary?," focuses mostly on the pending decision from US District Court Judge James A. Brady, who in 2008 ruled to overturn his conviction. That ruling was ultimately reinstated on appeal by the U.S. 5th Circuit
Court of Appeals.

Part two, entitled "Reforming Prison's Harshest Tactic," focuses mostly on solitary confinement in US prisons. You can read parts one and two at The Root, or you can read the two articles reprinted below, with our own photos added (quick link here).

Reforming Prison's Harshest Tactic--The Angola 3 case may help change the arbitrary and sometimes abusive use of solitary confinement.

(The second of two parts)by Katti Gray

(This article was originally published by The Root
on January 30, 2013 and is being reprinted here by Angola 3 News with
permission from the author.Click here to read part 1, "Freedom After 40 Years in Solitary?" on The Root website or scroll down to view the full article by Angola 3 News below. Special thanks to Katti Gray, whose articles
for The Root are archived here.)

In December 2012 the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit
to curb the use of solitary confinement in that state's prisons, broadly
decrying it as "extreme isolation" that imperils the physical and
psychological well-being of inmates on solo lockdown and risks
undermining prison safety overall.

Also in 2012, Maine lawmakers
-- including a Republican governor considered tough on crime -- voted to
formally ratchet back the use of solitary confinement in that state. In
addition, Congress hosted a rare special hearing on the practice,
highlighting the fact that the United States has no federal guidelines
precisely defining when solitary confinement should begin, when it
should end and which infractions merit such an added punishment for
prisoners.

Prison watchers and reformers, however, say that
incremental activity in 2012 does not in itself suggest that the nation
is anywhere near a wholesale crackdown on what many deem to be arbitrary
decisions about who is placed in solitary confinement. But in
Louisiana, where the remaining two members of the Angola 3 are
approaching 41 years in solitary confinement, there is cautious
optimism.

"It's exactly the kind of movement on this issue that we've been pushing for," said attorney and law professor Angela Allen-Bell of Southern University Law Center. Allen-Bell is a member of Free the Angola 3,
an international coalition of attorneys, human rights groups,
grassroots activists and moneyed benefactors who are helping to pay
legal fees related to the cause of Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace and
Robert Hillary King.

The three black men have consistently held that white officials of the Louisiana State Penitentiary
in Angola punished them for organizing an arm of the Black Panther
Party at the facility -- and, as self-taught jailhouse lawyers, for
challenging systematic rape of inmates, racial segregation and other
ills -- by falsely claiming that the men killed a 23-year-old white
prison guard in 1972. All three, who did not know one another before
Angola, landed at the prison in the 1960s after being convicted of
robberies that did not involve physical assault.

(Flyer from a recent New York City event featuring Robert King and other important critics of solitary confinement.)

Hope for One of the Angola 3

Lawyers
for Woodfox, 65, say that they expect a favorable ruling in his current
petition to be released, which will be heard "any day now" by the same
federal judge who ordered him freed in 2008. (State prosecutors
successfully appealed to have that ruling reversed.)

But Angola 3
attorneys are convinced that, this time around, they have more
emphatically proved the official corruption that resulted in the 1972
conviction of Woodfox and of Wallace, 71, the other Angola 3 member
still on solo lockdown.

(Robert King upon his release.)

King, 69, was released in 2001, after
accepting a plea bargain on charges unrelated to the murder. King, who
spent 29 years in solitary confinement, was never formally charged in
the killing, although Angola officials steadfastly claimed that he was
involved.

After Woodfox's current petition for release has been
adjudicated, lawyers plan to pursue the release of Wallace, who is
diabetic and suffers from what his supporters say is unexplained
swelling throughout his body.

"My brother's hearing is bad," Vickie Taylor, Wallace's sister, a retired security guard from New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, told The Root. "His health ain't so good. Period. He been in there so long, and that makes you feel real bad.

"But
he ain't letting prison stop him," she continued. "God fixed it so that
he and Albert and King remember everything from the beginning to the
end ... And it was told to me by God that this is their season. My
brother coming home, baby. I believe that."

Hers
is a shared resolve. Other Angola 3 supporters have been fixed, not
only on getting Woodfox and Wallace out of prison, but also on
spotlighting the impact of solitary confinement on the broader array of
people affected by it.

"Crowding, rape, long stints in solitary
confinement, beatings and other abuses and forms of torture are not part
of the punishment society has condoned. In fact, they are
unconstitutional abuses ... precluded as torture by all international
standards," psychiatrist Dr. Terry Kupers, a professor at the Wright Institute in Piedmont, Calif., told The Root. He is the author of Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It.

"Even
if [the Angola 3] had committed the crime for which they are accused,"
continued Kupers, another Free the Angola 3 coalition member, "the
constitutional and legally sanctioned punishment would be time in
prison, not torture in solitary."

Written comments that he
submitted to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution,
Civil Rights and Human Rights, which convened a hearing last June on "Reassessing Solitary Confinement: The Human Rights, Fiscal and Public Safety Consequences,"
noted, among other "psychopathological effects of social isolation,"
the "obsessive ruminations, confused thought processes ...
oversensitivity to stimuli, irrational anger and social withdrawal" of
some solitarily confined inmates.

Citing the research of psychologist and lawyer Craig Haney, author of Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of Imprisonment,
who testified in person before the Senate committee, Kupers added:
"More than four out of five of those evaluated suffered from feelings of
anxiety and nervousness, headaches, troubled sleep and lethargy or
chronic tiredness, and over half complained of nightmares, heart
palpitations and fear of impending nervous breakdowns ... Well over half
reported violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, chronic
depression and feelings of overall deterioration, while nearly half
suffered from hallucinations and perceptual distortions, and a quarter
experienced suicidal ideation."

Solitarily confined prisoners
self-mutilate at rates higher than those of the regular prison
population. Once released from prison, they recommit crimes at higher
rates, too, according to a solitary-confinement fact sheet (pdf) developed in 2011 by Solitary Watch, an online advocacy news site.

"There
is more interest in the subject than there was a couple of years ago.
When we started, there wasn't much interest at all," says journalist
James Ridgeway, co-editor and co-director of Solitary Watch. "And so
far, I don't think the effect of this new interest has changed the lives
of these people at all. They are just shut away. Forgotten people --
really, disappeared people. Most of them are people who are permanently
excluded. They are never going to come back. And they are in this
complete limbo."
According to the U.S. Department of Justice,
80,000 inmates nationwide (more than 2.5 million people are incarcerated
in U.S. prisons and jails) were in solitary confinement on any given
day in 2005, which is the latest year for which federal data are
available. Given that blacks and Hispanics make up a disproportionate
percentage of the prison population, they also disproportionately
account for those remanded to solitary confinement.

Concerning the
Angola 3, the prison's warden, Burl Cain, has affirmed that he would
never transfer Woodfox out of solitary confinement and into the general
population. "I would still keep him in [solitary]. I still know he has a
propensity for violence. I still know that he is still trying to
practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around
my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have
me all kind of problems, more than I could stand. And I would have the
[whites] chasing after them," Cain told questioner Nicholas Trenticosta,
Woodfox's lawyer, during a 2008 court hearing.

Case May Bring Crucial Change

"If we prevail, the benefit will be extended to everyone who is in a similar situation," Trenticosta, of New Orleans, told The Root.

"What
happens in Mr. Woodfox's case will be instrumental. It will be
crucial," says Parnell Herbert, a New Orleans playwright and Free the
Angola 3 coalition member.

Apart from Woodfox's petition for writ of habeas corpus,
a civil lawsuit seeking $5 million in compensation for an extended and
unmerited solitary confinement has also been filed on behalf of the
Angola 3.
The Angola 3 supporters contend that thus far, Louisiana's attorney general, James "Buddy" Caldwell, has been typical of prosecutors who refuse to admit that they made a mistake. (His office would not comment for this article.)

"We're not saying solitary confinement is never necessary. We're saying this is not the way to go about it," Allen-Bell says.

She
continues: "The greater issue is one of prisoners routinely in this
country being thrown into solitary cells for no infraction whatsoever.
They're subject to what I call perception profiling: A woman who
complained of being raped [by a prison guard] has the baby, then gets
thrown into solitary. People who [are gay] get thrown into solitary. [So
do] people who were in gangs when they were in their 20s, have tattoos
on their arms still, but they're 35 now and not involved in gangs. This
an arbitrary system with no legal criteria for putting people into
solitary and no legal means of getting them out."

Says freed Angola 3 member King, now a globetrotting prison reformer whose 2008 memoir, From the Bottom of the Heap,
has been revised and expanded: "The broader aspect of this -- and this
is what keeps Herman and Albert and myself going -- is that we are just
the tip of the iceberg. We have to convince the public of that. We have
to let folks know that what's going on with regard to solitary
confinement in America is totally reprehensible."

Freelancer
Katti Gray specializes in covering criminal justice, health care, higher
education and human resources. She is a contributing editor at the
Center on Media, Crime and Justice in New York City.

(Albert Woodfox, left, with Herman Wallace, right.)

Albert Woodfox: Freedom After 40 Years in Solitary?--Supporters of one of the Angola 3 tell The Root why he might be released this time.

(The first of two parts)by Katti Gray

(This article was originally published by The Root on January 29, 2013, and is being reprinted here by Angola 3 News with permission from the author. Special thanks to Katti Gray, whose articles for The Root are archived here.)After four decades of
solitary confinement in the nation's most populated maximum-security
prison -- and one of its most historically brutal -- a member of the
internationally known "Angola 3"
has reasonable cause to expect that he will soon be released, his
attorneys and supporters say. The request to set free Albert Woodfox,
65, is being heard by the same federal judge who in 2008 ordered that
Woodfox be released, a ruling that Louisiana prosecutors successfully
appealed and blocked.

Woodfox and Herman Wallace, now 71, were placed in solitary
confinement in 1972 -- theirs is the longest-running solo detention of
which human rights group Amnesty International is aware -- after being
convicted of killing a white guard at Angola prison, the slave
plantation-turned-Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Both men have consistently said that they were falsely accused and
that their conviction was the means by which prison officials punished
the Angola 3 for their membership in the Black Panther Party. Also a
member of that trio is Robert Hillary King, now 69, who was released in
2001 after plea-bargaining to a crime unrelated to the murder, a crime
for which he was never officially charged, although prison officials
insisted that he was involved.

(Left to Right: Herman Wallace, Robert King, and Albert Woodfox)

As prison activists, the Angola 3 had challenged ongoing, unpunished
rape of inmates -- including a system of "sexual slavery" that prison
officials eventually acknowledged -- racial segregation and other
adverse prison conditions. The three, who did not know one another
before landing at the 18,000-acre prison farm -- named for the town
where it is located, roughly an hour's drive from Baton Rouge --
initially were convicted in the 1960s of assorted robbery charges that
they do not contest.

Concerning Woodfox, his lawyers say that this time around, they
believe they have unequivocally affirmed several points favoring their
client:

* An all-white, all-male jury -- seated in a jurisdiction where
almost half the residents are black -- was wholly disinclined to
consider that the Angola 3, who are black men, were innocent of killing a
white prison guard, 23-year-old Brent Miller.

* State prosecutors bribed the sole, alleged witness to the killing
with a weekly pack of cigarettes and better living quarters in exchange
for reversing his initial claim that none of the three was at the crime
scene. Prosecutors and prison officials withheld details of that bribe
and other essential information during the trial; have since contended
that they lost evidence, including scrapings from the dead guard's
fingernails; and refused to release inmate fingerprints to compare with
fingerprints left near Miller's corpse that the Angola 3's lawyers
obtained.

* Subsequent court proceedings, including Woodfox's 1993 retrial,
were tainted by a pattern of excluding blacks from juries and of judges
exclusively choosing whites as foremen of grand juries that decide whom
to indict for trial. For that 1993 retrial, a white grand jury foreman
with a high school diploma was chosen over a black candidate who had a
college degree.

(Photo of the April 17, 2012 delegation that delivered to the Governor's office, a 67,000 signature Amnesty International petition demanding Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox's immediate release from solitary confinement. Governor Jindal refused Amnesty's requests to meet with the delegation.)

Racism's Pervasive Influence

"We had a jury of angry white men in 1972," Nicholas Trenticosta, a
lawyer from New Orleans who mostly handles death-penalty cases and is
representing Woodfox, told The Root. " ... Pure, flat-out racism is driving this train."

To amplify what the Angola 3's supporters say was the prevailing
racial climate at the prison, they point to a 2008 court hearing during
which Trenticosta questioned Burl Cain, installed in 1995 as Angola's
warden and widely viewed as a prison reformer who has overseen a decline
in violence at Angola.

(Transcript begins)Trenticosta:OK. What is it about Albert Woodfox that gives you such concern?

Cain:The thing about him is that he wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant.

Trenticosta: Well, let me ask you this. Let's just,
for the sake of argument, assume, if you can, that he is not guilty of
the murder of [officer] Brent Miller.

Cain: OK. I would still keep him in [solitary]. I
still know he has a propensity for violence. I still know that he is
still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want
him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new
inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could stand.
And I would have the [whites] chasing after them. I would have chaos and
conflict, and I believe that. He has to stay in a cell while he's at
Angola.(transcript ends)

While Judge James Brady of U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge, where
Woodfox's request for release is on the docket, is prohibited from
commenting on cases before him, court watchers say that he is keenly
aware of the racial dynamics of the Angola 3's case and the
constitutional issues it raises. (Brady issued the 2008 order for
Woodfox's release.)

"In 2008 Judge Brady ruled they should release [Woodfox]. I have no
reason to believe Judge Brady will not rule the same way today as he did
back then," said attorney Angela Allen-Bell of Baton Rouge's Southern University Law Center, a member of Free the Angola 3,
a coalition of human rights groups -- including Amnesty International
-- corporate moguls, philanthropists, grassroots activists and others
who are helping to pay legal fees related to their cause.

If Woodfox wins his petition for writ of habeas corpus -- Latin for
"free the body," a maneuver that does not address the question of
innocence or guilt -- he could be retried. Or, as his lawyers are
banking on, he could reach a settlement with state prosecutors, who
retained a private New Orleans firm to handle the case, that would
permanently end his incarceration.

(April 17, 2012, the day Amnesty International's petition was delivered, marked 40 years since Albert
Woodfox and Herman Wallace's were placed in solitary
confinement.)

The Cruelty of Solitary Confinement

As much as the Angola 3's case spotlights such concerns as racial
bias in jury selection, it brings to the fore the broad subject of
solitary confinement in a nation that, according to 2005 U.S. Department
of Justice data -- the latest federal tally available -- holds 80,000
prisoners under such terms on any given day.

"We're asking the federal court to consider what's taken place in the
state, to consider that what happened with the jury is a constitutional
violation and to set Woodfox free," said Allen-Bell, author of the article
"Perception Profiling & Prolonged Solitary Confinement Viewed
Through the Lens of the Angola 3 Case." "We're also pushing to change
the status quo."

Published in the summer 2012 edition of the University of
California's Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, that research takes
aim at what Allen-Bell and others contend is the arbitrary choosing of
whom to remand to solitary confinement in prisons across the United
States, a process that lacks streamlined criteria for such decisions and
places no limits on the duration of confinement.

That, said Amnesty International spokeswoman Suzanne Trimel, is
blatant hypocrisy: "The 40-year isolated incarceration of [Woodfox and
Wallace] ... is a scandal that pushes the boundaries of cruel, inhuman
and degrading treatment and flies in the face of international standards
to which the United States is a party."

Being constrained in a 6-by-9-by-12-foot, windowless cell was
inexpressibly difficult, Angola 3's King, who spent 29 years in solitary
confinement, told The Root. "You've got an
iron bunk, suspended on the wall, and an iron bench, a small table, a
commode and a sink," said King, whose jailhouse lawyering, alongside
that of Woodfox and Wallace, did eventually result in Louisiana's
solitarily confined inmates being allowed one hour, thrice weekly, in
the prison yard.

Staying Strong in Isolation

Assuming that Woodfox is released, that leaves behind bars, at least
for now, Wallace. His attorneys are also preparing to request his
release.

Roughly a year ago, Woodfox and Wallace were transferred to separate
Louisiana prisons, where they remain in solitary confinement and under
conditions, King says, that are harsher than those at Angola. April 2013
will mark Woodfox and Wallace's 41st year in solitary confinement.

"There were some things in Angola that they don't practice at Wade
Correctional Facility, where [Woodfox] is now," said King, now an
Austin, Texas-based, world-traveling prison reformer and author of From the Bottom of the Heap,
a 2008 memoir that has been revised and expanded. "He says the food at
Angola was better -- though food is generally bad in any prison -- and
the condition of the yard at Angola was better.

"He is separated from people with whom he was familiar," King
continued. "And he is 70 miles farther away from his brother, who he can
see now only while shackled and handcuffed. There are no contact visits
like what he had in Angola. So of course, Albert feels these are added
punishments."

(Robert King with Anita Roddick, August 2002.)

Until the mid-1990s -- when the Angola 3 drew moral and financial
support from a wide swath of people, including global activist Anita
Roddick, founder of the Body Shop -- the men represented themselves in
court matters involving conditions at Angola and other concerns.

"We were motivated by what had us in confinement," King said, "and
under those conditions, we had become politically aware and politically
conscious of what was going on. We operated out of a sense of
consciousness and the reality that there are flaws in this system that
need to be fixed."

Their activism, he added, helped them maintain their sanity and focus.

"After being in there for so long, you're not desensitized to the
situation, but you build up a resistance, so to speak, against the wear
and tear. You're in there ... so you have to become inured to being in
there," said King, who, postprison, has lectured and lobbied globally
against solitary confinement, conferring with former South African
President Nelson Mandela and actor-activist Harry Belafonte, among
others.

According to King, who recently spoke by telephone with Woodfox, his
friend's optimism regarding his pending court case is clear. "His
spirits -- notwithstanding the pressures of all this -- seem pretty
uplifted," said King. "He read the argument. He read the brief, both
sides. He imagines that the lawyers did a good job. His expectation is
high. Ask him if he'll be coming home and he tells you, straight up,
'Yes.' "

Even amid that hopefulness, there's reason for caution.

Californian Marina Drummer -- a Bay Area nonprofit executive, coordinator of the Free Angola 3 campaign and co-founder of Solitary Watch
-- said: "I can't say I'm [unequivocally] optimistic. We're dealing
with the state of Louisiana ... It seems as if they'll do anything to
cover their tracks. If we were going on the issue of justice, they'd all
be out by now."

(Professor Angela A. Allen-Bell, author of a recent Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly article focusing on the Angola 3, speaks in Baton Rouge at the Louisiana State
Capitol on April 17, 2012 when Amnesty International delivered a 67,000
signature demanding Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox's immediate
release from solitary confinement. Read her interview with Angola 3 News here.)

The state could, as it did previously, appeal to have a ruling in Woodfox's favor overturned, says attorney Allen-Bell.

After her own recent visit with Woodfox, Allen-Bell had this
observation: "What I do not hear from [him] is anger or bitterness. I
see them as civil rights icons, which they're very humble about ... They
don't see themselves as anyone special. They were doing the human work
that humanitarians do." She quotes Woodfox: " 'We were doing what
Panthers do. This is the penalty you pay for doing this kind of stuff.' "

--Freelancer Katti Gray specializes in covering criminal justice,
health care, higher education and human resources. She is a contributing
editor at the Center on Media, Crime and Justice in New York City.

--Angola 3 News is a project of the International Coalition to
Free the Angola 3. Our website is www.angola3news.com where we provide
the latest news about the Angola 3. We are also creating our own media
projects, which spotlight the issues central to the story of the Angola
3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement
as torture, and more.

Read Robert H. King's Autobiography

Angola 3 Basics

44 years ago, deep in rural Louisiana, three young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000 acre former slave plantation called Angola.

Peaceful, non-violent protest in the form of hunger and work strikes organized by inmates caught the attention of Louisiana’s elected leaders and local media in the early 1970s. They soon called for investigations into a host of unconstitutional and extraordinarily inhumane practices commonplace in what was then the “bloodiest prison in the South.” Eager to put an end to outside scrutiny, prison officials began punishing inmates they saw as troublemakers.

At the height of this unprecedented institutional chaos, Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King were charged with murders they did not commit and thrown into 6x9 foot solitary cells where they remained for decades.

“Hezekiah was one you could put words in his mouth,” the Warden reminisced chillingly in an interview about the case years later.

Notably, Teenie Rogers, the widow of the victim, prison guard Brent Miller, after reviewing the evidence believed Herman and Albert’s trials were unfair, expressed grave doubts about their guilt, and called upon officials to find the real killer. "“Each time I look at the evidence in this case, I remember there is no proof that the men charged with Brent’s death are the ones who actually killed him. It’s easy to get caught up in vengeance and anger, but when I look at the facts, they just do not add up,” said Rogers in 2013.

Albert’s conviction was overturned three times by judges citing racial discrimination, prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense, and suppression of exculpatory evidence. While the case worked its way through endless appeals, Louisiana officials refused to release Albert from solitary, even when no longer convicted of the crime, because “there’s been no rehabilitation” from “practicing Black Pantherism.”4

Finally, Albert was released in February of 2016, 43 years and 10 months after first being put in isolation for a crime he didn’t commit.

Louisiana today has the highest incarceration rate in the US—thus the highest in the world.

Three-fourths of the 5,000+ prisoners at Angola are African American. And due to some of the harshest sentencing practices in the nation, 97% will die there.

Reminiscent of a bygone era, inmates still harvest cotton, corn and wheat for 4 to 20 cents an hour under the watchful eye of armed guards on horseback.

We believe that only by openly examining the failures and inequities of the criminal justice system in America can we restore integrity to that system.

We must not wait.

We can make a difference.

As the A3 did years before, now is the time to challenge injustice and demand that the innocent and wrongfully incarcerated be freed.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

In 2000, Herman, Albert and Robert filed a civil lawsuit challenging the inhumane and increasingly pervasive practice of long-term solitary confinement. Magistrate Judge Dalby described their decades of isolation as “so far beyond the pale” she could not find “anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence.” Over the course of 16 years, this seminal case detailed unconstitutionally cruel and unusual treatment and systematic due process violations at the hands of Louisiana officials and inspired worldwide action to end long term solitary.

Support Our Work!

Stepping Across to Freedom

Please join us in laying the foundation for Albert’s new life. We’ll never be able to make up for over four decades in solitary but those of us in minimum security know how costly life out here can be. 100% of all donations will be given directly to Albert.

You can use the "Support Our Work" donate button (directly above) or go directly to our fiscal sponsor, Community Futures Collective and designate "Albert" in the memo.

From the entire Angola 3 community- thank you.

Amnesty International video interview with Robert H King: "Slavery Still Reigns in US Prisons"

Angola 3 News, a project of the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3, presents the latest news about the A3, and we also create our own media projects, spotlighting the issues central to the story of the A3, like racism, repression, prisons, human rights, solitary confinement as torture, and more. Our articles and videos have been published by Alternet, Truthout, Black Commentator, Black Agenda Report, SF Bay View Newspaper, Counterpunch, Facing South, Poor Magazine, Monthly Review, Z Magazine, LA Progressive, Dissident Voice, New Clear Vision, Nation of Change, Infoshop News, WW4 Report, Firedoglake, Indymedia, and many others.

Please help spread the word about our website and online networking at You Tube, Care2, Twitter, Facebook. For more info, please contact the A3 Coalition and visit our other websites:

Kenny 'Zulu' Whitmore

Zulu has been in Louisiana State Prison, Angola, LA since March 14, 1977. He had been in jail since 1975.

After threats and torture if he did not plead guilty, an unfair trial and the use of false information, Zulu was in '77 sentenced to life + 99 years for the 1973 murder of the former mayor of a small town, in which he had no part whatsoever.

Get a Zulu T-Shirt

FreeZulu.org

Kenny 'Zulu' Whitmore

“Zulu is a true warrior, Panther, a servant of the people. He has fought a good battle, for so long, unrecognized, unsupported!” --Robert Hillary King

ABOUT ZULU:

I am Kenny Zulu Whitmore. I have been enslaved in one of the most brutal and bloodiest prisons in the USA, Angola, LA, the "last slave plantation". Framed for a murder I never committed I have been in solitary confinement for over 30 years now.....

In December 1973 I was arrested on frivolous charges and held over for a magistrate hearing where a bond would be set. While awaiting my court appearance I found myself in a cage right across from a black man who struck me as a fearsome revolutionary. It turned out to be Herman Wallace. I was impressed with his words of wisdom, which enabled me to better understand the treatment and condition of my community by the police. I felt honored just to have been in his presence. There were others on the unit, but all you could hear was the voice of Herman. We talked all through the night after he learned why I was arrested. He explained that if my concern was to protect the people, my only route of doing so would be to educate myself of the political Kingdom and then organize the people to effectively challenge the ill that cripple the people. I realized my speaking out against drug dealers and police brutality alone would be viewed as a personal war and wouldn't achieve anything.

Herman told me he and others had established a chapter of the Black Panther Party in Angola, to fight against prison corruption. I gave him all my information because what he spoke of was what I needed in my life. I dare say it was my first true political education. The next day I learned he was there on trial for the death of a prison guard. At that time I believed he didn't stand a chance. In the mean time history has proven I was wrong. However, instead of focusing on his trial, he had many questions about community service and conditions. I ended up giving him my name and address. He told me he was officially making me a member of the Angola Chapter of the Black Panther Party. I was very honored but I had no idea what this man expected of me. But I knew about the Panthers and so I went back to the community with the idea of organizing the community against illegal drug trafficking.

On February 19, 1975 I was arrested again. This time charged with two counts of armed robbery of a Zachary shoe store. In June of 1975 all charges were dropped after both victims argued with the judge that I was not the person who did this crime. But I still couldn't go free...Read more here.WRITE ZULU: